* Addresses - Suggestion for Best Practice

[Gowermick]

When one addresses a letter in UK (other places differ) it is usual to use 'House Name/Number' followed by Street, followed by Placename. This works well for the postman but not necessarily for us when entering them into FH.

If I wanted to enter '39 Zanzibar Street' as an address, predictive text starts by listing all Addresses beginning with 39, and after 4 or 5 keystrokes would get to the correct address, (provided it had been used before), but the user would have no clue that other houses in the street were occupied by other members of the family.

If however, one stores the address in reverse (i.e Street followed by 'House Name /Number'), then predictive text will get us to the street with potentially fewer keystrokes, and furthermore, will list ALL addresses in that street together. We could then see at a glance all addresses in that street that had previously been entered.

The only decision now is where to enter above address using one or two field i.e 'Zanzibar Street 39' or 'Zanzibar Street, 39'.

Anyone see any flaws in my suggestion or any technical preference for 1 or 2 fields.

Mike

[StevieSteve]

Hi

Consider something like Kensington Church Street instead of Zanzibar Street

Won't you have to type all the way up to Kensington at least to see whether you already have an address entry, as you might also have entries for Kensington High Street, Kensington Mews, Kensington Gardens, Road, Street etc, etc?

I am coming to the conclusion, though, that it would be better that the house name / number is in a separate field but I think I'll stick it at the beginning

[Gowermick]

Steviesteve,

The length of the street name is immaterial, you will have same problem whether street name is long or short. The question is whether to have 'House Number/Name' before or after street name!

My proposal means you get to the meat of the address (street name) quicker if you place it before the number rather than after.

e.g. 2, 4 and 99 Kensington High Street would be listed together under Kensington High Street, rather than with the other 2's, 4's and 99's!

Mike

[mjashby]

At the end of the day it's down to user choice and deciding what purposes you (or any user) will be doing with the address field:

- If you do follow a practice of entering a street name followed by a house number, what's it going to read like if you include the address in narrative reports?
- What will you do if a house/building has a name but no number? How would that read in reports?

eg. Fred Smith was born at Zanzibar Street, 39, ......; or Fred Smith was born at 39, Zanzibar Street, ... and
Fred Smith was born at 39th Street, Clarence House, ..... or Fred Smith was born at Clarence House, 39th Street, .....

Mervyn

[tatewise]

I would certainly suggest putting house name, house number, and street in three separate comma separated column parts.

Remember you can use Tools > Work with Data > Addresses/Places and sort on any column to for instance bring all similar street names together.

[Gowermick]

Mike,

I realise one can view the columns in any order as you say, but I was more concerned on the inputting side of things, and making best use of the predictive text feature.

I feel it is more useful whilst inputting new addresses, to discover that the street already has potential relatives living there, something you may miss when inputting the house number first.

Mike

[Gowermick]

Mike,

Following on from my last post, I have come to the conclusion that entering the house number/ name is best done in separate columns/fields as you suggest.

That way, it gives you more options when working with the address data.

To sum up, to keep things consistent, I have decided (my) best practice would be to enter addresses as 'Street' + ',' + 'Number' + ',' + 'House Name'.

Where address has just a 'House Name' and no Number, I will leave 2nd column blank, and put 'House Name' in 3rd Column.

Mike

[jimlad68]

I suggest you read the links from this post, a few relate to using a "reversed" place/address format. As you mention it should make the "not very good" FH predictive text better. To Move Address into Place Record - or Not (12946)

I repeat here my post at the end of this topic, Rearrange Address and Place Parts Plugin (12330) and I have found it so much easier to tracks down an address when entering Places in facts and easier to spot duplicates.



Following the introduction of the "Rearrange Address and Place Parts Plugin" (RAPPP) I have again experimented with my PLACe comma separated fields ordering them with the largest field first e.g.

(N.B. This is for "modern" addresses to tie in with automatic geocoding with things like the Map Life Facts FH Plugin and Google Maps.
To be used if needed in conjunction with a PLACe SOURCE records where extra/old detail upsets auto geocoding OR for simply giving more historic detail about a place nand its people.)

[1] country
[2] state
[3] county
[4] Town or Large village
[5] small village if associated with nearby town OR area of town
[6] street
[7] house number or a place name understood by Google Maps (separate column to aid street number sorting)
[8] -" house number if no longer exist/ property name/ detail/ flat number" = extra FH searchable detail, not for Google maps search, might include old no longer existant house numbers.
(you need to put inside -"xxx" any detail that upsets Google Map search, as it ignores this, similar with Map Life Facts FH Plugin but minus sign not needed - this can be added with the LUA pattern mode in the Search and Replace plugin)
[9] post code
[10] possibly for lat/long as in TMG, but unfortunately not globally used, but would be Standard Gedcom.

I have found that within FH this makes it so much easier to find PLACes, especially when using the Place List (e.g. selecting a place for a Fact) which has rather limited search capabilities.

Drawbacks:
- not the standard order, but then it was never defined as far as I can tell for Gedcom, so it might confuse other recipient programs.
- If doing automatic geocoding type searches with things like Google Maps (and hence Map Life Facts Plugin) sometimes does not give as good results which is more important once outside of FH.

So, to get around this for say Map Life Facts Plugin:
- Run RAPPP to get the fileds in the best order for automatic geocoding searching.
e.g.
[1] house number or a place name understood by Google Maps
[2] street
[3] small village if associated with nearby town OR area of town
[4] Town or Large village
[5] county
[6] state
[7] country
[8] post code
[9] -" property name/detail/flat number" not forgetting the -""
[10] possibly for lat/long as in TMG, but unfortunately not globally used, but would be Standard Gedcom.

- Then perform Map Life Facts Plugin, (or export as Gedcom etc etc)
- when all complete, simply rerun RAPPP again putting the fields in the order you wish for FH use.

Try it on a copied project, only takes a few minutes. You will be amazed at how much faster it is to find PLACes via the Place List.[/quote]